


Symphony In Both Victim and Villain

by Rabbit



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, V for Vendetta (2005)
Genre: Gen, Murder and Mayhem, Other, Post-Canon, at least probably not, no they don't do it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:01:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29718963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbit/pseuds/Rabbit
Summary: Long long ago, fleeing a crushing defeat, a Phantom crossed a pond. Now, in the grimdark future, he meets his match. I have no idea how to tag this. In progress.
Relationships: V & Erik
Kudos: 2





	1. Overture: In Memory Of The Things They Do To You

He woke up not screaming, but with the screams ringing still in his ears. Burned and dying, from flames or illness, burned and not innocent at all, the screams of the flames. But he is not screaming.

He woke up laughing.

V dreams of music, sometimes, beyond the music of fire, other kinds of music, sweet and forbidden. Music of another age, music which is to him a reminder of something he will never, truly remember. Sometimes, when he is quiet in his lair beneath the earth, he hears it rising as if from a deeper place, beneath his feet, and he wonders just how alone he is, truly, in reality…

But then the music stops. He puts his hand to the forehead of his mask and wonders just what the hell it was they did to him, all of what they did to him. The music has ended, but it is still inside of him, in his heart and in his head, coiled beneath the crusting of scars and waiting for release.

He carries it with him up to the rooftops, where like so many other things, he will set it free.


	2. Act 1: The Things They Built

London certainly possessed an Opera, although it had ever warred with those of Paris and Italy and Germany for supremacy over the musical world. We have always been at war with Oceania, as they say, and our war is a cultural war, as well as a war of the heart and the mind. It is a war of words, of ideals, and of ideas. It is a war of music.

When they began to ban everything that had been beautiful, the man in the darkest of places hardly noticed. And then strange sounds, ugly and metallic, began to scrape down to his hole from the place that had once been the Royal Opera House above, which long ago had ceased to sing anything of any real value. The silence troubled him very little. This noise however… it gritted his teeth, it ground them, invading his air and his solitude and his sorrow. It behooved him to climb up and above, to seek it out and stop whatever it was that made it, to treat them to a few quick and merciless bars of true and revealed beauty before they suffered a final silence. His fingers cracked on the bars as he climbed above and towards it.

In a way, he was quite looking forward to it.

The noise got uglier, louder, more jabbering, a thousand fat Carlottas and crashing cymbal monkeys, discordant and choppy, worse than the infidel Jazz when it had come in its time. Searing, vile noises that had driven him Below in the first place, once he had come to London, so long ago now. As he rose, they separated themselves, and while he could not properly call them notes, the nature of the instruments… boots, marching in unison. Gunfire in staccato syncopation, percussive knife-swipes, stabbings in back alleys like cymbals rolled together on their edges, buzzes… electric, a new sound. Almost exciting. He climbed higher, through tiled, lofty subway tunnels long bereft of their trains-- they put him in mind of the old catacombs of Paris, the way they were dank and hollow and sang when the heels of his shoes clicked along their concrete ways. He hummed against the hideousness above, and the thinnish humming filled the tunnels with a rounder, more robust echo. A subterranean cathedral for the music of buried angels, if only…

He stopped himself, hand on one of the ugly metal railings in the middle of the broad, broken steps, his vision red with blood and hatred. Things he did not wish to think of, things that made the ugly upstairs sound almost sweet against the mad, horrid things that screeched inside of his skull. _Pathetic_ , he seethed against his own mind. The two little humans that tormented him… doubtless that they were dead by now, dead and forgotten, immortality something that one of them had turned from like a blind little fool and that the other had never been capable of in the first place. Silly little moths, horrid moths, pathetic and silent…

…silent. All of a sudden, there was silence above. He cocked his head, the emergency lights of the tunnel reflecting on the edge of his mask. The silence was sweet, round and swollen-- gravid with potential. The razor hairs on the back of his neck stood up in a most delicious way. He felt… excitement. Anticipation.

And that is when the music began.

Gentle… seductive music. Yes… it began quite gently. A triumphal piece… a bit maudlin, as it were… /he/, of course, would have made it more complex, more menacing… but it was a British piece, and it had a certain British obviousness. Fitting, if trite… He drummed his gloved fingers on the rail and moved a few more steps upward with the rise of the crescendo, and then…

The CLIMAX! He had heard nothing like it in his born days-- like a cannon, like a million cannons all at once, a battlefield roaring above his head, shattering the silence and the memory of the miserable noises and the… past, the way that it was, all of it, in one glorious explosion of noise. He flew upwards, levitating practically, out through the boarded entrance to the Underground, up the side of the building, to the rooftops, the roofs… to see the destruction and the fire, and the sky full of colored, exploding stars in the shape of a glittering red V, over the London-night sky.

"Perhaps…" He whispered, humming along with the music, the explosions, "…perhaps, it is indeed time for me, again. Perhaps this city, this age…" He watched the old empty building burn and spark, "…is finally ready for my Music."

A beautiful thought. All he needed now was the Voice. And across the rooftops he spied quite suddenly- quite startlingly!- a glimpse of hair, golden and dazzling under the fireworks, and a bright flash of red glimmering off of a pale, white mask. This halted him, froze him solid and teetering, as if he had caught a glimpse of his own reflection passing a mirror. A blink, and they both were gone.

A moment later and so were the explosions… so was the music. The silence had returned. 

But Erik… he was not inclined to return below, to the dark and the depths and his own long silence. It was time, /more/ than time, to see what this new world had to offer him…

...What glorious new musics he could make, in this new world.


End file.
